New Major Features for 3.0
- Upgraded to Fedora 40
- KDE Plasma 6 - GNOME 46 - Linux Kernel 6.8 - AMD/Intel GPU driver upgrades
- Ayn Loki Max Pro support
- Ayn Loki Zero support
- Improvements for supported handhelds
- HHD Overlay is now stable
- Gyro support parity with Lenovo Legion Go
- Charge limits set for Lenovo Legion Go
- ASUS ROG Ally custom TDP that use the kernel driver
- Custom fan curve support for ASUS ROG Ally
- Added CDEmu
- Added Ollama ujust command
- Added fastfetch
- Added zoxide
All of that, and more details about the rest can be read on the announcement page here —> https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/announcing-bazzite-3-0/1218
In case, like me, you hadn’t heard of Bazzite before:
Bazzite is an OCI image that serves as an alternative operating system for the Steam Deck, and a ready-to-game SteamOS-like for desktop computers, handheld PCs, and living room home theater PCs.
It’s basically Nobara, but properly done. (If you choose the desktop version)
It gets updates automatically (max one day after upstream Fedora), has everything you want ootb in the first start wizard, is more secure, and much more.
I was very sceptical at first, but after trying it out, I really noticed some minor performance improvements in games and many QoL improvements, e.g. the preinstalled LACT, which allows me to set up fan curves and over-/ underclock my GPU.
Setting up my new PC took me about half an hour maximum.
9/10, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a smooth gaming experience.
What has nobara not properly done? I wanted to try it as a daily driver.
The only issue I can see is this is more of a team effort, and Nobara has always primarily been for GER and his Dad. The differences though are minimal, though I will always sway towards something with the image based design of Bazzite for a gaming/work setup.
But then why don’t you simply develop a toolkit that installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
installs all those things and sets things up properly on a standard fedora install?
That’s exactly what all universal blue images do. It’s just that setup is done every single day in github from scratch and stamped out as an image so that the end result gets to your computer as a finished deployment artifact. Leads to better update reliability, built in rollback.
The biggest benefit is that it’s easier for a community to fix the fast moving gamer stuff as a config layer on top of a distro that’s delivered this way than me having to manually figure out what component of my gaming setup changed that week.
That would be very very hard and unreliable.
Bazzite is more than just “preinstalled Steam”, it has a list of tweaks, optimizations and additions so long you can’t even finish reading it all! 😅
This includes a different kernel, pre-configured containers, and much more.
If you do that on a regular system, configuration drift would quickly destroy any good experience in no time and result in a huge mess.uBlue provides a solid base distribution (pretty much stock Fedora) and applies exactly your way, but in upstream, and then copies that new image to millions of PCs. By doing that, you can provide many many identical copies that are the same everywhere and always up to date, without the burden of maintaining a whole distro like on Nobara.
The hard and boring work of maintaining a distro is on the shoulders of the Fedora team, and you only have to maintain your own changes.This seems something with too big of an attack surface.
Not really.
- Most stuff is installed in containers
- The pros of image based distros still apply here in terms of reliability, security, etc.
- Its no more than a few hours away from upstream stock Fedora
- Most apps (Lutris, OBS, etc.) are optional and opt-in, if you just click “next, next, next” in the installer you’ll get a relatively vanilla experience compared to stock Fedora
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How does it have a large attack surface? I thought being immutable reduced the surface.
I am intrigued. Presently using Nobara right now, and I’ve been running into strange issues, like the whole system suddenly becoming unwritable and Firefox crashing out of the blue and needing an entire system reboot.
Have not tried immutable distros, but I like the idea that the core OS is read-only to prevent a rookie user from messing things up.
Then again, if the core OS is read-only, is it at all possible to modify some system files like fstab files to auto-load drives?
/etc is completely writeable. This is why we don’t use the term “immutable distros” because Bazzite and the rest of universal blue are neither immutable nor distros.
(This is why Fedora moved to the term Atomic)
Noted. I guess used the wrong definition for Bazzite and that confused me. LOL.
Good to know that /etc is writable. I might have to download it and give it a spin. Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, I don’t know all of the details, but most of the system config files like fstab and such are modifiable. I automount my NAS by putting a command in fstab.
Bazzite is my first true experience with an immutable distro, and wow, what a magical moment it was.
I’ve been eyeing on fedora 40’s release for some time now because it fixes all the Wayland problems for Nvidia cards. One night my grandma needed some help, so I walked away from my PC, it automatically suspended, came back 30 or so minutes later, and when I logged in I was just automatically on KDE 6 with fedora 40, didn’t even reboot.
This is truly the year of the Linux desktop.
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Are u sure it didn’t shut down when you were away?
uBlue updates itself, yes, but the updates are staged and need a reboot to apply.unless maybe it automatically restarted and put all my applications back on screen that I had running, not sure. but I know it didn’t shut down since I literally hit the power button and it was immediately on, it was asleep.
Immutable means that the OS will change itself without asking while you’re not looking ?
What do you do when you don’t like the change ? I would email Linus about it to complain.
they have an option which lets you turn off automatic updates
and with immutable distro’s, you can always rollback to a previous state instantly and not update the OS if you don’t want to, just the applications.
This and BLuefin are such good projects, I run Bazzite on 2 pc’s deskop and consolised gaming pc and Bluefin on my workstation
They really are! Love that it’s even possible to make your own image with on tweaks and such, really cool.
I’ve never looked into it hard core but at some point I will go into all the stuff Jorge and the rest have uploaded and teach myself, but currently I don’t need to I’ve not touched the OStree on any installation so far.
Yeah ive never been a fedora guy in the past but I’m really loving everything that comes from ublue.
https://bazzite.gg/ If anyones interested scroll to the bottom and there’s a little wizard to select the right image for your needs, don’t worry too much you can always rebase :)
The download tends to fail for me. Have to constantly restart it and pray it finishes. Then the installer seems to be error-prone. I actually have to reinstall it today because, somehow, simply restarting my PC results in a slideshow from the boot screen onwards. I always seem to have issues with the installer Fedora-based distros use.
Guessing you’ve tried installing silver blue and reading from that?
Fedora, Ultramarine, and Bazzite for distros, but haven’t tried Silver Blue.
Fantastic. I’ve been planning to install it on a new PC build this weekend so the timing works out well
What does Bazzite brings that Nobara doesnt already?
Bazzite also has the backing of a bigger group of developers and community. Whereas Nobara is developed by a solo (kudos to him). But I would say Bazzite differs quite a bit too with its immutability, automatic updates, and thanks to libostree technology, after every update the previous version of the operating system is retained on your machine. This means, should an update cause any issues, you can select the previous image at boot. Additionally, it has support for gamescope, meaning Steam can boot straight into Big Screen mode, which is very handy for gaming pcs and steam decks etc… Can read the rest of the details over at bazzite.gg, if you’re not convince :P
Would you have any idea why bazzite.gg is consistently crashing android firefox? Trying to scroll past “waydroid” makes the app reload and is taking some of my services with it, which is really weird.
That’s sounds weird, just tried myself and works fine here. Maybe try in private mode (or without extensions)? Assuming you have not enabled all extensions via private tab.
It only happens with the mobile version of the site, desktop version is fine.
The crash still happens in a private tab, as well as the in-app firefox browser on Boost. Even when disabling uBlock, still crashes.
Is this due to an old android version maybe? I’m still rocking android 9, would that limit firefox somehow? Firefox is still 125.2.0, so that’s not old yet.
Maybe it’s using too much memory. That would explain why firefox isn’t making a crash log, and might explain why my services are dying too. The issue is always with the “work with your hardware, not for it” section, which never loads and always causes a crash when it should load but never before. Perhaps there’s a big memory leak there in the mobile version?
Sounds like something worth mentioning to the Devs at least 😅
Hey! Would you happen to know the keyboard command to bring up the side panels when in a game in game mode? I know ctrl-1 and ctrl-2 work when outside the game but they don’t appear to work when in a game.
Immutability, mainly.
I don’t know if its still the case but originally Nobara was a “this is for me but you can use it too” type of project.
I’m curious too. I’m definitely gonna have to think about looking up how they compare to each other followed by how they compare to SteamOS.
Nice. Been running bazzite deck on gpd win mini and after a bunch of tweaking its been rock solid. Looking forward to finally trying plasma 6.
I’m running Fedora 40 on my PC and my laptop. Now, having read how much most of you like the experience, I guess I’m moving my laptop to Bazzite. I did install Bazzite on my Steam Deck, but the experience was worse than with SteamOS for the Stadia controllers, which is what I use (not that the experience is stellar or anything on SteamOS, but Bazzite never once reconnected without having to re-pair, SteamOS at least does like 60% of the times.)
It is true that Bazzite had some bluetooth issues, if that’s what you’re referring too. Personally, got hit by this too, but can warmly say that none of those issues remain on their latest 3.0 version. PM me if you need help setting it up or have any questions :)
Thanks for letting me know. I installed Bazzite on my laptop last night like 5 minutes after I read this thread. I guess it’s the Steam Deck’s turn to give it another shot.
If you are like myself and use your PC mainly for gaming, and your laptop just for casual use (watching videos, writing notes, etc.), then you can also take a look at Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE).
It’s a “replacement” for the stock Fedora Silverblue/ Kinoite with QoL stuff and on the spectrum between Bazzite (“bloated”) and the uBlue base image (extremely lean, missing a few standard apps by default) and gives you the choice between “I’m a casual user” (-> only what you need) and the “developer edition”, which includes some IDEs and stuff.
I like it a lot and think of it as “Bazzite, without gaming stuff”. Maybe you’ll like it too!
My case is the opposite. I game on my laptop or my Steam Deck, and work on my PC. I installed Bazzite on my laptop yesterday right after going over this thread. On my PC I also tinker quite a bit, so I just have plain Fedora Gnome on it. I’m going to spin a VM with Bluefin to play with it a bit. Thanks for the tip. One thing that could be an issue with Bluefin, and maybe you can enlighten me here, is that according to this video on their site, they have done away with OS-tree? Because that would make this entirely based on FlatPaks and no other options, which is a huge block for me.
they have done away with OS-tree? Because that would make this entirely based on FlatPaks and no other options, which is a huge block for me.
I don’t understand exactly what you mean with that, but I think you are afraid of any restrictions.
- uBlue (Bluefin, Bazzite, etc.) is still Fedora Atomic, just like Silverblue. It’s just that they take the OG image, rebuild it based on some instructions, and then redistribute it. It still has OSTree and all other stuff.
- You aren’t set on Flatpak, but you definitely should use it on image based distros. Flatpaks are great and convenient, that’s why they’re getting more and more popular, also for devs. Because of that, the default (and only) way of installing apps via software center is Flatpak. If you don’t like that, you can still use Distrobox (e.g. with Pacman, DNF, etc.), Nix, Brew, or any other package manager you like, b but that’s more for CLI-users.
- I mostly work graphically, but if I have to do some CLI stuff, then I enter my Arch-Distrobox. I never encountered any problems or restrictions there tbh
- And you can still layer (install rpm packages on the host system) via rpm-ostree if you really need it, but it’s not recommended and only there for essential stuff. Use containers instead.
I use rpm-ostree on Bazzite. What put me off was when the guy in the video (I’m assuming he’s one of the maintainers) said “you have FlatPaks, and that’s it”. But if OStree is still there, I’m golden to take it for a spin.
I’ll spin the VM and see if I encounter any blocks. And you are absolutely correct, I am afraid of any restrictions.
Compared to Bazzite, there shouldn’t be (m)any differences. You can see Bazzite just as a gaming-oriented Bluefin
I’ve had a lot of experience with Linux and I use Nobara currently. My only catch with Bazzite is that I didn’t know the first thing to do. It somehow felt as if most of my experience in Linux was just useless.
Not saying it’s a bad thing, I just decided I’d stick to Nobara for now and try learning Bazzite in the future to give it a fair shake.
I’m also a tweaker. I like to play with ZRam and add other things to the OS, like a custom kernel with BCacheFS-Git to support my gaming darastores. I suspect some of my creature comforts may be harder to get.
You could give the uBlue builder a shot, which can do exactly that.
But I think NixOS is a better choice for a tinkerer like you :)
So I’m not the only one who feels lost with Bazzite, even after years tinkering with other distros?!
I need to sit down and try to wrap my head around the file structure, it just feels completely different except for the home dir.
This really caught my eye, but does it make sense for an older PC?
It won’t transform the old device into a gaming beast, but if you do some lighter gaming with it, why not just try it? :)
If you don’t like it or want something more vanilla/ general purpose, you can always rebase to other Fedora Atomic variants, e.g. Silverblue, Kinoite, uBlue community images (Secureblue, Deepin, etc.) anytime you want! This changes the “flavor” (basically like switching from Linux Mint to Kubuntu by reinstall) without loosing any data or settings with one command. It’s so fucking great!Depends on the specs and what you want to use the PC for really.
I’m running Bazzite on desktop cpu to use with steam link and do self hosting. Docker stuff was pain but it saved me a lot of pain by having gaming work out of the box.
I do have a request for help with Bazzite. In all my Gnomes I’ve always used dash-to-dock with intellihide. With Bazzite, I for some reason I just can’t understand, when I move the pointer to the bottom to have the dock come up, bazzite opens the workspaces view.
Is there a way to disable this?
Other than that, Bazzite has been rock solid and super customizable on my Gazelle 16.
I’ve never personally used Gnome so fotm know how to navigate it. But I am sure this is something you should be able to do disable. I’d look either in shortcuts, workspace or gesture settings maybe?
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Thanks, but I toured the whole settings yesterday, together with Gnome Tweaks, Dconf and the dock-to-dash settings and didn’t find anything. Granted, I don’t have a great handle of Dconf, so there are things I didn’t touch to avoid messing everything else up.
This seems to be exclusive to Bazzite Gnome. I’ve used Gnome with absolutely every distro and this has never happened before. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature I don’t like, lol.
I guess I’ll take my chances on breaking it all and roll back if needed.
I’d jump into their Discord to ask for advice regarding this.
I’ll try that. Not a huge discord fan, but I guess I can make an exception.
Yeah it is what it is… peronsally use Vencord(has flatpak) that has stripped out the discord telemetry and added features :)
You’re on a roll with the tips. Thank you.
